How to triage slow service alerts

A production alert reports that a web service is showing high latency or slow responses. As an SRE, describe how you would triage, investigate, and mitigate the issue. Your response should address:

• confirming whether the alert is real and assessing its severity,
• identifying the blast radius and user impact,
• which Linux, host, network, application, and dependency checks you would run,
• what immediate mitigation actions you would take to limit impact,
• how you would communicate throughout the incident and steer the service back to recovery. Overview: This question assesses operational troubleshooting and incident management skills — system observability, severity assessment, blast-radius and user-impact analysis, dependency and performance diagnostics, mitigation decision-making, and incident communication.